Towards Psychometrics-based Friend Recommendations in Social Networking Services

Two of the defining elements of Social Networking Services are the social profile, containing information about the user, and the social graph, containing information about the connections between users. Social Networking Services are used to connect to known people as well as to discover new contacts. Current friend recommendation mechanisms typically utilize the social graph. In this paper, we argue that psychometrics, the field of measuring personality traits, can help make meaningful friend recommendations based on an extended social profile containing collected smartphone sensor data. This will support the development of highly distributed Social Networking Services without central knowledge of the social graph.Comment: Accepted for publication at the 2017 International Conference on AI & Mobile Services (IEEE AIMS

An Emergent Architecture for Scaling Decentralized Communication Systems (DCS)

With recent technological advancements now accelerating the mobile and wireless Internet solution space, a ubiquitous computing Internet is well within the research and industrial community's design reach - a decentralized system design, which is not solely driven by static physical models and sound engineering principals, but more dynamically, perhaps sub-optimally at initial deployment and socially-influenced in its evolution. To complement today's Internet system, this thesis proposes a Decentralized Communication System (DCS) architecture with the following characteristics: flat physical topologies with numerous compute oriented and communication intensive nodes in the network with many of these nodes operating in multiple functional roles; self-organizing virtual structures formed through alternative mobility scenarios and capable of serving ad hoc networking formations; emergent operations and control with limited dependency on centralized control and management administration. Today, decentralized systems are not commercially scalable or viable for broad adoption in the same way we have to come to rely on the Internet or telephony systems. The premise in this thesis is that DCS can reach high levels of resilience, usefulness, scale that the industry has come to experience with traditional centralized systems by exploiting the following properties: (i.) network density and topological diversity; (ii.) self-organization and emergent attributes; (iii.) cooperative and dynamic infrastructure; and (iv.) node role diversity. This thesis delivers key contributions towards advancing the current state of the art in decentralized systems. First, we present the vision and a conceptual framework for DCS. Second, the thesis demonstrates that such a framework and concept architecture is feasible by prototyping a DCS platform that exhibits the above properties or minimally, demonstrates that these properties are feasible through prototyped network services. Third, this work expands on an alternative approach to network clustering using hierarchical virtual clusters (HVC) to facilitate self-organizing network structures. With increasing network complexity, decentralized systems can generally lead to unreliable and irregular service quality, especially given unpredictable node mobility and traffic dynamics. The HVC framework is an architectural strategy to address organizational disorder associated with traditional decentralized systems. The proposed HVC architecture along with the associated promotional methodology organizes distributed control and management services by leveraging alternative organizational models (e.g., peer-to-peer (P2P), centralized or tiered) in hierarchical and virtual fashion. Through simulation and analytical modeling, we demonstrate HVC efficiencies in DCS structural scalability and resilience by comparing static and dynamic HVC node configurations against traditional physical configurations based on P2P, centralized or tiered structures. Next, an emergent management architecture for DCS exploiting HVC for self-organization, introduces emergence as an operational approach to scaling DCS services for state management and policy control. In this thesis, emergence scales in hierarchical fashion using virtual clustering to create multiple tiers of local and global separation for aggregation, distribution and network control. Emergence is an architectural objective, which HVC introduces into the proposed self-management design for scaling and stability purposes. Since HVC expands the clustering model hierarchically and virtually, a clusterhead (CH) node, positioned as a proxy for a specific cluster or grouped DCS nodes, can also operate in a micro-capacity as a peer member of an organized cluster in a higher tier. As the HVC promotional process continues through the hierarchy, each tier of the hierarchy exhibits emergent behavior. With HVC as the self-organizing structural framework, a multi-tiered, emergent architecture enables the decentralized management strategy to improve scaling objectives that traditionally challenge decentralized systems. The HVC organizational concept and the emergence properties align with and the view of the human brain's neocortex layering structure of sensory storage, prediction and intelligence. It is the position in this thesis, that for DCS to scale and maintain broad stability, network control and management must strive towards an emergent or natural approach. While today's models for network control and management have proven to lack scalability and responsiveness based on pure centralized models, it is unlikely that singular organizational models can withstand the operational complexities associated with DCS. In this work, we integrate emergence and learning-based methods in a cooperative computing manner towards realizing DCS self-management. However, unlike many existing work in these areas which break down with increased network complexity and dynamics, the proposed HVC framework is utilized to offset these issues through effective separation, aggregation and asynchronous processing of both distributed state and policy. Using modeling techniques, we demonstrate that such architecture is feasible and can improve the operational robustness of DCS. The modeling emphasis focuses on demonstrating the operational advantages of an HVC-based organizational strategy for emergent management services (i.e., reachability, availability or performance). By integrating the two approaches, the DCS architecture forms a scalable system to address the challenges associated with traditional decentralized systems. The hypothesis is that the emergent management system architecture will improve the operational scaling properties of DCS-based applications and services. Additionally, we demonstrate structural flexibility of HVC as an underlying service infrastructure to build and deploy DCS applications and layered services. The modeling results demonstrate that an HVC-based emergent management and control system operationally outperforms traditional structural organizational models. In summary, this thesis brings together the above contributions towards delivering a scalable, decentralized system for Internet mobile computing and communications

Using Blockchain Technology in Smart Life Applications

مقدمة: Blockchain هي قاعدة بيانات يتم تخزينها بترتيب زمني بطريقة آمنة ومستقرة. كانت Bitcoin هي التطبيق الأولي لتقنية Blockchain ، ولكن نظرًا لفوائدها من حيث الأمان والخصوصية والتحكم الذاتي ، فقد تم اعتمادها منذ ذلك الحين من قبل مجموعة متنوعة من التطبيقات. يتم إنشاء تقنية Blockchain عن طريق ربط الكتل معًا بشكل مشفر. نظرًا لأن كل كتلة تحتوي على كلٍ من التجزئة الخاصة بها وتجزئة الكتلة السابقة لها ، فلا يمكن لأي شخص خارجي كسر السلسلة. تُستخدم تقنية Blockchain ضمن مجموعة متنوعة من التطبيقات ، بما في ذلك الصناعية والتجارية والأمنية وسلسلة التوريد وإنترنت الأشياء وغيرها. هذا لأنه يتميز بمزايا التحكم في البيانات وتنظيمها وتخزينها. الغرض من هذه المقالة هو سرد بعض التطبيقات ومجالات التطوير الخاصة بـ Blockchain.   طرق العمل: في تقنية Blockchain ، يعد الأمان والاستقرار (الثبات) واللامركزية من بين الأشياء المهمة التي تجعل هذه التقنية مفيدة في مختلف مجالات الحياة التي تخدم المستخدم. تم استخدام هذه المزايا لحل العديد من المشكلات التي تواجه الشبكة ، بما في ذلك المشكلات المتعلقة بالإنتاجية ووقت المعالجة وقابلية التوسع. تم استخدام طرق مختلفة في الحل ، بما في ذلك العمل على تغيير هيكل الشبكة ، واختيار عقدة أساسية (المدير) ، والتعدين الموازي ، والتنافس مع عمال المناجم الآخرين. الاستنتاجات: ازداد الميل إلى استخدام تقنية Blockchain في العديد من المجالات ، بما في ذلك المالية والزراعية والتجارية والصحية وإنترنت الأشياء وغيرها ، نظرًا لمزاياها ، بما في ذلك اللامركزية والتوزيع والموثوقية والاستقرار. هناك اتجاهات أخرى عملت على تطوير أداء وكفاءة وأمان نظام Blockchain نفسه في إنترنت الأشياء والرعاية الصحية وسلسلة التوريد والقطاع المصرفي والتسويق الرقمي بالإضافة إلى الدراسات التي تشمل تحسين الكفاءة والأمان وتطوير النظام.Background: Materials and Methods:      In Blockchain technology, security, stability (immutability), and decentralization are among the important things that make this technology useful in various areas of life that serve the user. These advantages were used to solve many problems facing the network, including those of productivity, processing time, and scalability. Various methods were used in the solution, including working on a change in the network structure, choosing a basic node (the manager), parallel mining, and competing with other miners. Results:     Through recent studies, it has been shown that the Blockchain technology has been used in various fields, as it is characterized by many advantages, the most important of which are security, decentralization, and stability. Because of these advantages, it outperforms other technologies. Conclusion:     Due to its advantages, the tendency to use blockchain technology has increased in many fields, including financial, agricultural, commercial, health, the Internet of Things, and others. It includes decentralization, distribution, reliability, and stability. There are other trends that have worked to improve the performance, efficiency, and security of the blockchain system itself, In the Internet of Things, healthcare, supply chain management, the banking sector, and digital marketing In addition to studies that include improving the efficiency, security, and development of the system

Collaborating with Users in Proximity for Decentralized Mobile Recommender Systems

Typically, recommender systems from any domain, be it movies, music, restaurants, etc., are organized in a centralized fashion. The service provider holds all the data, biases in the recommender algorithms are not transparent to the user, and the service providers often create lock-in effects making it inconvenient for the user to switch providers. In this paper, we argue that the user's smartphone already holds a lot of the data that feeds into typical recommender systems for movies, music, or POIs. With the ubiquity of the smartphone and other users in proximity in public places or public transportation, data can be exchanged directly between users in a device-to-device manner. This way, each smartphone can build its own database and calculate its own recommendations. One of the benefits of such a system is that it is not restricted to recommendations for just one user - ad-hoc group recommendations are also possible. While the infrastructure for such a platform already exists - the smartphones already in the palms of the users - there are challenges both with respect to the mobile recommender system platform as well as to its recommender algorithms. In this paper, we present a mobile architecture for the described system - consisting of data collection, data exchange, and recommender system - and highlight its challenges and opportunities.Comment: Accepted for publication at the 2019 IEEE 16th International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (IEEE UIC 2019

Crux: Locality-Preserving Distributed Services

Distributed systems achieve scalability by distributing load across many machines, but wide-area deployments can introduce worst-case response latencies proportional to the network's diameter. Crux is a general framework to build locality-preserving distributed systems, by transforming an existing scalable distributed algorithm A into a new locality-preserving algorithm ALP, which guarantees for any two clients u and v interacting via ALP that their interactions exhibit worst-case response latencies proportional to the network latency between u and v. Crux builds on compact-routing theory, but generalizes these techniques beyond routing applications. Crux provides weak and strong consistency flavors, and shows latency improvements for localized interactions in both cases, specifically up to several orders of magnitude for weakly-consistent Crux (from roughly 900ms to 1ms). We deployed on PlanetLab locality-preserving versions of a Memcached distributed cache, a Bamboo distributed hash table, and a Redis publish/subscribe. Our results indicate that Crux is effective and applicable to a variety of existing distributed algorithms.Comment: 11 figure